It’s been a really significant week for legal developments: while the newsletter has more of a copyright focus than usual, the courtroom updates are balanced with some really interesting technical developments from Creative Commons, Anthropic and others (skip down if you’re less interested in the legalities). It points to the fact that, however long a road to a settled legal and licensing position, there are immediate practical uses for AI in publishing.

This edition covers Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s bullish AI update and what billions of agents mean for supplier teams, Turing Institute/LEGO research on how children and teachers are using generative AI, a PLS consultation on licensing for AI training, new image-generation tools from Midjourney and Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT’s new Record mode on Mac, Reddit’s Community Intelligence product, a New Yorker piece on what AI is doing to reading, and the resignation of UK PM AI Adviser Matt Clifford.

It’s Friday 13th. Unlucky for AI image platform Midjourney, which is about to find out why “don’t mess with The Mouse” (or an earthier paraphrase) is a popular aphorism in media law. Luckier for publishers, with some powerful new tools this week: in particular, Google’s Deep Research could be a game changer for production of ancillary content.

Thirty weeks of doing this—thanks for sticking with me. Someone asked this week if this newsletter will be going paid, and to be really clear: NO. I enjoy researching and writing it, and it’s a wonderful way to start conversations. However, if it’s something that you find useful, please do share it with your colleagues. Personal referrals make a huge difference to me, and every one is genuinely appreciated.

Maybe there will be a quiet week for AI and publishing. If so, we haven’t seen it yet. Across a range of stories this week, the clear theme is that while AI might automate the output, the value lies in the inputs: good content, sound metadata, thoughtful contracts and sound human judgement.

This edition covers the US House passing a tax bill with a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation, OpenAI’s continued lobbying for Fair Use, Anthropic’s new Claude 4 hybrid models, the announcements from Google I/O including SynthID Detector, Shopify’s AI enhancements and MCP integration, Anil Dash on Model Context Protocol as a Web 2.0 moment, a new paper on AI in higher education, the Chicago Sun Times’s hallucinated book list, and Steven Bartlett’s fully AI-written-and-voiced podcast.

I’m writing this from a very sunny Edinburgh, where I presented to the lovely Canongate team at their away day. It was great to get off camera and out of the office and have conversations with a group of brilliantly creative people on their event theme, ingenuity, and how AI can support it. If you’re looking for a speaker for your conference or event, do let me know.

This week’s newsletter starts with a question that’s been quietly nagging at many of us working with generative AI: are we saving time, or just skipping the thinking? A brilliant post introduces the idea of “cognitive debt”—the mental version of technical debt—where shortcuts today can cost us clarity tomorrow. It’s a useful lens for publishers figuring out how to scale AI responsibly, especially as new tools promise more speed, but not always more understanding.